In Assam, Searching for New Crops and Farming Methods for Depleted Soil

Courtesy of Brian Orland Farmers working in their paddy fields in Jorhat district of Assam on March 29.

Boralapar, ASSAM â€" For generations, the annual monsoon cycle blessed the upper Assam village of Boralapar with ideal conditions for paddy farming. Moderate annual flooding of the Dorpang River, a small tributary of the Brahmaputra River, enhanced the rich, loamy soil with a yearly booster dose of river-borne nutrients.

But over the past decade, upland deforestation and repeated embankment failure have turned the Dorpang vicious. Volatile flash floods can last for days, drowning paddy and burying fields under sand and stones. And now climate change models project that the incidence and intensity of such hazards will increase in the coming decades.

Courtesy of Brain Orland Dorpang River, a north-bank tributary of the Brahmaputra River, in Lakhimpur district of Assam is prone to frequent flash floods.

In Lakhimpur district, which includes Boralapar, about 19,000 hectares, or 20 percent of the total area on which paddy is cultivated, already suffers from such “sandcasting,” according to statistics from the Assam Ministry of Agriculture. In neighboring Dhemaji district, almost 35,000 hectares of land has been degraded in the same way.

So what’s a paddy farmer in these affected areas to do Give up, as far as most of the village’s young people are concerned. They either leave Boralapar to study for alternative career paths, become shopkeepers or just hang out around the local paan stall shooting carom, a kind of finger billiards played with little wooden discs.

But not Lila Hazarika, a 47-year-old farmer in the village. He’s determined to find something that will grow in this new soil and climate regime. “I experiment with many plants,” Mr. Hazarika related with a mixture of pride and rue.

So far, his forays into such vegetable cash crops as corn, green peas and gourds have earned him occasional profit, but mostly losses and the skepticism of his neighbors. Last year alone, he spent 250 rupees ($5) on seeds, a significant investment for a largely subsistence farmer, and hours of labor in a failed attempt to raise watermelons.

Courtesy of Brian Orland Lila Hazarika in his field in Lakhimpur district of Assam on April 1.

But Mr. Hazarika remains optimistic: “With the right seeds and methods, watermelon will grow in my sandy soil.”

Mr. Hazarika is on the right track, according to agronomists at Assam Agricultural University’s regional research station, a couple of hours’ drive down the road from Boralapar. With their flood-affected region in upper Assam increasingly covered by nutrient-poor soils that have low water retention, the agronomists’ focus is to identify a new suite of crops and a new cycle of farming.

They go about their business with a steadfast, straightforward empiricism: identify plants that naturally repopulate the sandy soil, match those species with cash crop varieties that are similar, and finally test those cash crops for productivity and marketability in the local environment.

Through this process, they discovered that sugar cane is suitable for degraded farmland in the floodplain by noticing that a similar species of reedy plant thrives on the sandy banks of rivers. Now, nearby in Matmora, where sandcasting has wiped out entire villages, farmers are cultivating sugar cane for a profit.

As for the paddy crop that is planted during the monsoon season and is the mainstay of Assam’s agrarian economy, farmers should give it up â€" at least, that’s the opinion of Prabal Saikia, principal scientist at the research station. He advocates vegetable cash crops in the dry season, as well as a switch to planting shorter-duration paddy varieties before and after the flood season in lieu of the traditional summer paddy crop planted by flood-affected farmers in Assam.

“Paddy during the flood season is too risky,” Mr. Saikia said. His opinion was borne out last year when strong flood waves in July and September damaged hundreds of thousands of hectares of paddy throughout Assam. Many farmers’ entire crop was destroyed.

Even so, at least one local farmer, Tonkaswar Borah, finds Dr. Saikia’s recommendations “crazy.” “I would never try it,” he said.

The key problem is water for the winter crops, in Mr. Borah’s view. Even during the dry season, periodic sprinkles would provide enough moisture to sustain some winter crops under Boralpar’s traditional methods of dry-land farming. Now skittish rains mean that irrigation is required for decent production.

But in Lakhimpur district, only 6 percent of cultivated land is irrigated. No farms in Boralapar have irrigation systems.

The agronomists promote a kind of tube well that is pumped with bamboo pedals and costs a relatively affordable 2,500 rupees. But such a pump can only lift water a maximum of 30 feet. With Boralpar’s water table now at a depth of 35 feet, reliable winter cropping would require a motorized pump that would cost 10 times as much, a princely sum, Mr. Borah pointed out.

Neither he nor his neighbors can afford such a purchase without a loan from the bank, but they say they will never get one. “Our main problem is that we don’t have access to capital,” said Mr. Borah.

When asked about the state-run agricultural bank set up for allocating these kinds of loans, he dismissed the idea. “The rich guys are getting loans for bikes and cars â€" but we can’t even get a loan to irrigate our crops,” he said.

Then, too, there’s the question of what Boralapar’s villagers would do during the long, fallow months of the monsoon season, traditionally the busiest time of year. Well, there are always the pleasures of the local paan stallâ€"at least until the Dorpang, in an errant flash flood, decides to carry off the carom board on its way to Bangladesh.

Brian Orland, a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, is studying climate change adaptation along the Brahmaputra River. This post is dedicated to Jagot Chekanidhara, the subject of Mr. Orland’s previous post, who passed away at the end of March from a respiratory infection that received proper medical treatment too late. Mr. Chekanidhara is remembered in his village for his persistence in cultivating agriculture in the face of tough conditions.